‘Out!’ he shouted after me. ‘Out!’
Various busmen turned to look as I sprinted for the gates, and then beyond.
There was only one way to go and that was down Constitution Hill, until I was out of breath, at which place I would, no doubt, meet Kitty and Liam. But I did not find them until I came to the gates of a church: Liam, even then, with some idea of sanctuary-that even a bus conductor in his uniform couldn’t get to you here.
We went in to pray-and I really believe this to have happened on the same day-we knelt up near the altar with the idea of pursuit at our backs, and after our hearts had settled we looked at each other, the need to laugh shifting even as we looked into a higher, more spiritual thing. So it was with a sense of pious elation that we gave thanks for our deliverance at the altar of St Felix by lighting a candle each and then, when we could find no slot for our pennies, lighting two or three more, until a priest marked Kitty’s upper arm with a ring of bruises, giving us, as he held on to her, a lecture on wickedness that was dense with rage. And I can not remember a single word of it, or what Ada later said about the state of Kitty’s arm, though I do recall the thick, vivid quality of the priest’s mouthing face, like undiluted fruit squash. And though common sense says that these two events should not have happened on the same day, I say that they did, and when a man followed me through the back streets of Venice, many years later, with his erection in his hand, I ducked into a church as though inviting something worse-instead of which, I got nothing: empty seats, mould on the wall, a piece of paper stuck under a muddy oil painting, with ‘di Tintoretto’ written in biro. There was a dark side chapel with heaven itself painted on the ceiling, at least when you put in a 100-lire coin for the lights to come on. Otherwise all was shabby, and calm. There was no worse thing waiting to happen to me. I knelt with my back to the flaring white rectangle of the open door, but the street Italian did not come up behind me, a child did not walk out of the confession box with his cupped hands holding a jigger of sperm, no saint moved. I bent my head and prayed like a woman in a fifties film, I prayed that it would leave me, the choking sense that this was the way I would die, my face jammed in filthy gabardine, of navy or black, a stranger’s cock in the back of my throat and what, what, what?
Something turning in my stomach. A knife. No knife.
It isn’t real.
But ker-klunk. The lights in the side chapel came on, with a great noise, followed by the slow mechanical grind of someone’s money running out. I knelt and watched Germans and English come in and figure out the lire box and switch heaven on, while at my back the Italian with his erection lingered at the open door of the church, or not. (What was he going to do with it anyway?) At any rate he failed to cross the threshold, and when I finished my desperate, atheistical praying jag, I turned and found that he was gone. Which was fine. Except that now, when I walked the streets, he was everywhere.
We were good children, mostly. I imagine that we were good children, in those days in Broadstone; a bit quiet, a bit worried, perhaps; Liam especially prone to sudden switches and changes of tack, but these were as often hilarious as awful, and though Kitty was a pain in the neck it was in a childish sort of way, and there was no harm in any of us, that I can think of-why would there be?
9
THE MAN BESIDE me on the train to Brighton lifts his pelvis slightly, and settles it back down. He is dozing in the flickering, sexual sunlight, lulled and unsettled by the movement of the train. I can sense the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit.
Here comes another one.
And then again, there is nothing to fuss about-a young businessman having a hard-on beside you on a train-even if you are recently bereaved. Given the state I am in, I find the hydraulics of it more than usually peculiar. Such small things to have such large consequences. I wonder, briefly, if Liam would still be alive if he had been born a woman and not a man. And there he is, suddenly, leering behind the tea trolley, in a Dick Emery headscarf and industrial support bra.
‘Cooeee! I’m alive!’
And, ‘No thanks,’ I say to the perfectly respectable woman who offers, ‘Refreshments?’ as the man beside me reaches for a newspaper to hide his lap.
Harmless. Harmless. Harmless.
And I close my eyes.
Liam walked into my hospital room the evening after Rebecca was born. He just showed up, with a bunch of pink flowers from the downstairs shop. Tom was gone home to get some sleep and the phone calls were done and people were leaving me time to recover, but I was high as a kite, showing the baby off to nurses and cleaners, wondering was it a football match or a terrorist attack, that had all her admirers stuck in some traffic jam?
And there was Liam in the doorway-I didn’t even know he was home. And there was I, propped up on the pillows in a heap of extra sweat with a baby-untouchably fine-in the plastic cot by my side.
He moved across the room to take a look and there was a solidity to him as he bent over the next generation, checking, in a proprietorial way, eyes, fingers, toes, the tiny pores on her nose plugged with yellow stuff that made me panic already about blackheads when she was grown.
‘How are you?’ he might have said.
I don’t think we kissed. The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas.
‘I’m fine,’ I would have said back.
And he sat in the visitor’s chair and looked at this new scene: mother and child.
‘Was it all right?’ I remember he said that, and I remember I said, ‘Well, it’s all right now.’
The walls were painted yellow and there was something thick and ecstatic about the sunshine, now that the baby was born.
I remember thinking how good he looked; how handsome he might seem walking down a street of strangers, my slightly fat brother. He was happy to see the baby. He was reduced, by the sight of her, to someone I knew in my bones.
The birth had given me back my sense of smell, which had been oddly thwarted while I was expecting, and so I was in an aromatic rush with my nose stuck into a glass of champagne that I refused to drink but sniffed all afternoon. I could tell, from one hour to the next, how the drink was spoiling as it met the air. This was the place where I existed-in the smell that drifted from the top of a pool of champagne-beside which, even Liam’s clothes felt loud.
I told him our mother had phoned, and that she had cried.
‘Cried?’ he said.
‘She thought we were all barren,’ I said, though I felt my betrayal in a tinge. I had been pleased enough to hear from her at the time.
We talked about her for a while.
He was eyeing the glass on the bedside locker, and I told him it was only a little aeroplane sort of bottle. But he finished it off for me before he left, warm and flat and grubby as it was with whatever pungent stuff was spilling out of my pores as I deflated slowly into the room. I didn’t mind. I told him I was glad to have the smell of it gone.